Report: NSA was spying on Salt Lake City during Olympics

Union Pacific’s Olympic Caldron car is being dressed up to be shown off during the Olympics in the middle of the street at 300 west and 100 South in Saltk lake City The Olympic rings are used as part of the decoration on the car. February 5, 2002. Photo by Scott G. Winterton/Deseret News.

Deseret News

Summary

The National Security Agency monitored all email and text communications out of Salt Lake City in the lead-up to and during the 2002 Winter Olympics, according to media reports issued Wednesday.

“We knew nothing about this, so it was a little surprising to read this, that there was that kind of surveillance activity.”

SALT LAKE CITY — The National Security Agency monitored all email and text communications out of Salt Lake City leading up to and during the 2002 Winter Olympics, according to media reports Wednesday. But a top Olympic official here tied into security concerns said he had no idea the data collection was occurring.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the NSA worked with Qwest Communications International Inc. to collect text messages and email in the Salt Lake area during a six-month period surrounding the event.

The report, part of a detailed account in the Journal and similar NSA revelations in the Washington Post, came on the same day the NSA declassified three secret court opinions revealing how one of its surveillance programs scooped up as many as 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans not connected to terrorism over three years.

It also revealed that the secret court ruled those actions unconstitutional and brought change. But that report was not directly tied to the Salt Lake Olympics surveillance, which was a decade earlier.

"We knew nothing about this, so it was a little surprising to read this, that there was that kind of surveillance activity," said Fraser Bullock, chief operating officer of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics.

"We worked very closely with many security agencies, including the FBI, the Secret Service, FEMA, etc. And we were aware of many activities they were doing to keep people safe," Bullock said. "We were not aware of these, but we put everything in context. The Olympics had been targets of terrorism twice in the past, in Munich and Atlanta."

The 2002 Games occurred only five months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., prompting increased security at the Olympics.

Mark Molzen, a spokesperson for CenturyLink, formerly Qwest, told KSL Radio that no one currently working at CenturyLink has knowledge of Qwest operations at the time of the surveillance gathering reported by the Journal.

The changes to surveillance, released in the declassified reports Wednesday by the NSA, show that three senior U.S. intelligence officials realized the extent of the NSA’s inadvertent collection of Americans’ data from fiber-optic cables in September 2011.

One of the officials said the problem became apparent during internal discussions between NSA and Justice Department officials about the program’s technical operation.

“They were having a discussion and a light bulb went on,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The problem, according to the officials, was that the top secret Internet-sweeping operation, which was targeting metadata contained in the emails of foreign users, was also amassing thousands of emails that were bundled up with the targeted materials.

Because many Web-based mail services use such bundled transmissions, the official said, it was impossible to collect the targeted materials without also sweeping up data from innocent domestic U.S. users.

The officials did not explain why they did not prepare for that possibility when the surveillance program was created and why they discovered it only after the program was well underway.

Officials said that when they realized they had an American communication, the communication was destroyed. But it was not clear how they determined to whom an email belonged and whether any NSA analyst had actually read the content of the email. The officials said the bulk of the information was never accessed or analyzed.

Popular Comments

It is crazy to me how they do this to ya'll and then you Utahns invite them
right back into your own back yard--right in Bluffdale. Don't you think it
is time to take a stand against these people who have no regard for our privacy?

9:39 p.m. Aug. 21, 2013

Top comment

JohnJacobJingleHeimerSchmidt

Beverly Hills, CA

All you that voted for GW Bush, you can stop with the outrage. You didn't
care about it then but you care about it now?

7:09 a.m. Aug. 22, 2013

Top comment

Esquire

Springville, UT

I wonder how many of those who are outraged supported the Patriot Act.